Senate spectrum legislation introduced Monday would authorize incentive auctions to pay federal and commercial users that voluntarily give up unused frequencies and would require a national spectrum plan. The Spectrum Measurement and Policy Reform Act, sponsored by Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Communications Subcommittee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., aims to update national spectrum planning, management and coordination activities. The legislation would give the the FCC and the NTIA $10 million over the next two fiscal years.

Regulatory proposals in the U.S. like broadband reclassification and the National Broadband Plan have drawn significant interest from other countries, said Philip Verveer, U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy, in an interview Monday. But the outcome of the reclassification proposal isn’t expected to cause the U.S. government to amend its international policy recommendation on communications issues, he said.

Senate negotiators continue “intense” negotiations on a comprehensive cybersecurity overhaul measure, but there’s no news on whether the Department of Homeland Security or the Commerce Department will lead the nation’s cybersecurity defenses, said sources. The Senate has been wrestling with multiple cybersecurity bills this session, notably S-773 sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and S-3480, sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. (WID July 12 p1). A major difference is that Rockefeller’s bill would list Commerce as the lead cybersecurity agency and Lieberman’s would tap Homeland Security.

Congress has been laggardly in not bringing back tax certificates that once were used by companies selling media assets to minorities, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said Monday. “I do not understand why the 111th Congress has not passed legislation to reinstate” a revamped and improved certificate, he told a Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) conference. “This seems like a no-brainer.” McDowell and colleagues Meredith Baker and Mignon Baker agreed on the panel that access to capital is the biggest hurdle faced by minorities desiring to enter the media business.

Further broadband deployment should encourage economic growth for minorities but there are important steps that must be taken first, trade-group executives said Monday. Speaking to the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council conference, NAB President Gordon Smith called for the reinstatement of the minority tax certificate, also sought there by FCC members. (See separate report in this issue.) “We have to increase diversity of ownership by restoring the tax certificate that was available to the minority community,” said Smith. “We should have amended, not ended the minority tax certificate.”

Consumer protections for California phone customers have dwindled since the Public Utilities Commission deregulated phone rates in 2006 and adopted a “hands-off” approach to telecom, the state Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes said. In a report that consumer advocates praised, the nonpartisan office said Friday the commission “has consistently failed” to give consumers “basic information” that would arm them against fraud and encourage informed choices in picking phone carriers. State law mandates that the commission guarantee “just and reasonable” utility rates, but the regulator, “in effect, no longer tracks phone rate increases at all,” the office said. It was created in 2008 to give senators nonpartisan opinions on government performance.

Two months after an FCC majority refused to find that the U.S. wireless market is competitive in its annual wireless competition report, the same majority is expected to decline to declare that broadband is being deployed to all Americans “in a reasonable and timely fashion,” commission officials said Friday. The latest negative review of how markets are working is in the Section 706 broadband competition report, which the commissioners voted on last week and is expected to be released in the next few days. Republicans Robert McDowell and Meredith Baker are expected to dissent from the broadband report, as they did to the wireless report. The report is the first since the initial report in 1999 not to give the industry a clean bill of health on deployment.

Telephone service providers asked to be relieved of the duty of verifying customers’ eligibility for the Lifeline program. Verification should be a government function, they said in comments to the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service on proposed changes to the Lifeline and Link-Up programs. They split on the question of whether the Lifeline program should include broadband and whether households should be eligible for more than one discounted phone connection.

Opponents and supporters of reclassification filed long, often strongly worded filings in response to what FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski calls his “Third Way” broadband-reclassification proposal. The comments land at a sharply divided agency.

Regulators’ negotiations with industry over broadband reclassification probably will be long and slow, economists and analysts said in interviews. Meanwhile, a third meeting between Hill staffers and industry representatives Friday took up various spectrum policy matters (CD July 16 p9) that could require a rewrite of the Telecom Act, officials said.